The Allies is one of London’s most popular sculptures

A SOCIAL media post went viral when a user uploaded a photo of the Juliet statue in Verona, where tourists have touched her brass bosom so many times she now looks like the confused owner of a pair of Belisha beacons.

The question was why statues of men did not show the same signs of wear and tear, to which came back several photos of the statue of Portuguese soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo in his hometown of Funchal – with its noticeably well buffed crotch.

In New Bond Street it’s all a little less sensual, but the shiny corners of the work known as The Allies is a clue to just how many people pose for a photo with Sir Winston Churchill and Franklin D Roosevelt.

The rub suggests people like to take a sturdy grip of each man’s thigh. I walked past this week and a holiday crowd were queueing up to do just that.

It took me back to the story of how its now sadly-deceased sculptor Lawrence Holofcener had returned to the scene years after its introduction on the upmarket shopping street in 1995, complete with clay and tools.

The popularity of the statues on the bench had perhaps taken him by surprise and he revealed later that his “impetuous” nature had meant he had never made a maquette before starting work.

It had been suggested to him by the former Hampstead gallery owner Gillian Catto that he would’ve been able to sell a miniature for a fair penny, and so he went back to stare at his own work in order to make a series of quarter-size replicas. Fifty of them are out there somewhere in the world.

One of the maquettes popped up for sale last September at an auction house, with the hammer falling at £35,000.

It must have been quite a scene to see him copying his piece with studious accuracy, and passers-by not realising who he was.

“Julia [his wife] and I drove to Bond Street from our Isle of Wight home, plus table, tools, clay and the little bench. We set it all before the life-size sculpture and I got to work,” he later revealed.

Some people asked him what he was up to and he remembered the conversations as follows:

Are you an art student?

Do I look like a student?

Have you got the artist’s permission?

The artist is dead.

How about the City of Westminster?

I’ll be gone before they catch me.

Mr Holofcener, who passed away in 2017 aged 91, had added in his recollections: “After four to five days of work and chatter, I was finished.”

Amid a tiresome “culture war” debate over whether people must worship Churchill or not, those who clearly don’t have damaged the statue in other ways than a quick stroke at different times over the years, but it remains one of the city’s most popular works.

So admired in fact, a handful of life-size replicas of The Allies made by Mr Holofcener go for a lot – a lot! – more than £35k.